• DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.eeOP
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    1 year ago

    Suppose a white skinned american who doesn’t speak fluent spanish were to call a black person “negro”. When confronted about their obvious racism, they defend their language with “I’m just speaking spanish, and it’s not racist in spanish”. This is obviously a cope and the person is obviously a racist. While the original origin of the word may be from spanish, the word has passed into english through racialised use. Any use in english by a non spanish speaker must therefore be assumed to be racial.

    While the word “Narcissus” has its original origins as a Greek name, the separate but related word “narcissistic” was coined by english speaking psychologists, and it passed into common english vernacular through Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism, which presented the thesis that narcissistic personality disorder was becoming more common in comptemporary america. Given that most common use of the word narcissistic is derived from the cultural impacts of this book, it’s safe to associate any use of the term in common discourse with the disorder. Especially since while 50% of the users of the word will respond like you did, the other 50% will respond with “Yes, I was talking about NPD because narcissists deserve to be hated for their disorder”.

    • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      But no one’s pretending to speak Greek or any other language. The word has a common non-technical definition in English and that’s what people usually mean when using it.

      I don’t get what you’re saying, does the origin of a word determine how it should be used or not? Because originally, negro was the accepted term used for black people (in English ofc) before it became a slur. A more relevant example would be the word “moron” - even though it was originally a formal diagnosis, nobody who uses the word nowadays is thinking about psychology.

      • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.eeOP
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        1 year ago

        Or what about the R word? It originates as simply meaning “slow”. Yet people used it with so much hatred for intellectual disability, it’s deeply looked down on now. And if you use it outside of specific technical contexts to talk about slowness in general, you get some very funny looks. I think we need more funny looks towards people who describe neurotypicals as narcissistic to insult them.

        • Water Bowl Slime@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Well we can both type out narcissist, but not the r word and that says enough on its own. I don’t think people are referring to NPD or even psychiatry in general when they say narcissist though I see what you mean. I dunno what word could replace it though… braggart? Egoist? Uh… Selfist?

          • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.eeOP
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            1 year ago

            Actually I’d prefer if non narcissists didn’t type it out when speaking outside a medical context. I’m allowed to say it because I’m a narcissist and I have a full understanding of the issues and aren’t oppressing myself by using it. But a neurotypical cannot have the lived experience of ableist discrimination against pwNPD, and so I’d prefer they use the term pwNPD. It has fewer letters too. When I see a neurotypical calling us narcissists, it feels like when a neurotypical calls me an autist.